I was standing on the courthouse steps, Sid’s niece having taken him back to the rest home, when a voice behind me said, “I would’ve put him in jail.”
“Sure you would’ve,” I said when she stood next to me.
“At least for seventy-two hours.”
“Sure you would’ve.”
“Well, at least forty-eight.”
“Not even twenty-four.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“First of all, the jail wouldn’t know what to do with anybody that old. And second of all, even as mean as you can get, you’re not that mean. Well, not usually.”
She gave me one of her rare smiles. She was an undisclosed fifty-something. And still a damned good-looking woman. Hand-tailored business suits, white scarves at the neck, dark hose, one-inch heels, just a touch of gold at the wrist. Standard operating gear for Judge Esme Anne Whitney. All the attire bought, of course, in New York City, which she escaped to three or four times a year.
The day was so ridiculously gorgeous I wanted to run around in circles and give out with Indian whoops. Like a little kid. Maybe roll around in piles of autumn leaves. And then later carve out a jack o’lantern.
“They’re all friends of mine and they’re all ruined,” she said.
“Yeah. I know.”
“I talked to Peter Carlson earlier today. He seems to think that when they find the killer that this’ll start to fade. I felt very sorry for him. But they were so stupid. This was like some fraternity boy prank or something. Keeping a woman, the four of them. My God.” She shook her sculpted head. Great graying hair cut short to emphasize the features of her face. “I know this’ll sound pompous, McCain. But I want to help our little town. If you’ve seen any of the state papers, we’re the laughingstock. ‘Peyton Place Comes to Iowa.’ We don’t deserve that.” She gave me a second rare smile. “Believe it or not, I realized when I saw all those nasty innuendos in the papers that I love this little town. It’s not very sophisticated and there isn’t much to do and the Sykeses haven’t spent a dime on anything remotely resembling culture—but the people are decent and the town’s a nice, safe place to live.”
I looked at her and laughed. “Why, Anne Esme Whitney, I can’t believe it. You’re actually sentimental about our little town here.”
Then she did it. Dipped into the small slash pocket of her custom-tailored suit and pulled out a rubber band. I wasn’t quick enough. She got me on the nose. She loved shooting rubber bands at me, the way Sid liked shoplifting I suppose. Made me really look forward to my own years of senility.
“It’s up to you, McCain.”
“To me? What’s up to me?”
“To find the killer and get this part of it over with at least.”
“Believe me, I’m trying.”
“I’m going to say something and you’ll probably disagree with me. But at least think about it for a while.”
“Fair enough.”
“I don’t think any of them killed her.”
“I’m going to surprise you and say that I agree with you.”
“Why, McCain, you’re much smarter than I ever realized.”
I tapped out a smoke from the pack. “No matter how I think it through, I can’t see any of them doing it. They had too much to lose. Even though each one of them is trying to convince me that one of the others did it.”
“Crime of passion?”
“Possibly. But only with Karen Hastings. Killing the brother had to be premeditated.”
“So that leaves us with whom?”
“Somebody who wanted to destroy them by forcing the whole thing out in the open. Not only destroy their reputations but implicate them in a murder besides. That leaves us with the wives of the four men and a mysterious man in a black Corvette.”
“Where he does he fit in?”
“He visited Karen Hastings a number of times recently, I’m told. From the insignia on his license plate, I take it he’s an MD.”
“Keep me posted, McCain.”
“I will.”
FOURTEEN
THE DOCTOR’S NAME WAS Ned Evans. His office was out on First Avenue, the main drag in Cedar Rapids. Every once in a while you’d see an interurban track shining through the bricks. Somewhere in this area was the last of the blacksmith barns. Cedar Rapids had always been a special place for me because it was there I got to shake hands with Hopalong Cassidy. He was the most Irish man I’d ever seen except for my cousin Donald, who came here from County Cork. In his black outfit and big dramatic black hat, Hoppy looked like somebody from a different species. Everybody else looked small and incompetent compared to him.
The small city shone like a trophy in the early afternoon sun. I stopped at a drive-in for lunch. The carhops didn’t wear roller skates. Penny loafers seemed to be the general choice in shoes. I heard four or five girl-group songs. There was a guy named Phil Spector, a record producer, and that was his specialty, girl groups, wondrous girl groups, and they were so good that when you heard them sing you almost resented it when the following song was sung by a guy. Man, their sounds were so sweet and light and melancholy, they just took you out of reality.
I listened to the radio while I ate. There still hadn’t been any response from Russia, though its ships could be seen heading toward Cuba. President Kennedy had called a news conference and then an hour later canceled it. I spent a few minutes with mutant dreams. All those drive-in movie images of radioactive beasts that had formerly been men. I always felt sorry for the mutants. They hadn’t asked to be mutants. But that’s the way life was. Some of us got the hero roles and the rest of us got to be the ragged, smelly, bulge-eyed mutants. Guess which of us got the women.
The office was in a new two-story building of glass and metal. Very futuristic, like something on the covers of one of my old science fiction magazines. Most of the cars in the parking lot were new. With their huge fins they looked futuristic, too. I always wanted to be one of those guys on science fiction paperback covers. Very tense in their futuristic clothes, a ray gun in their hand, and a lovely scantily clad blonde accompanying them. Just give me a time machine and say goodbye.
Evans’s receptionist was young and dark-haired and pretty. She was also competent. While she was taking notes from the phone—lab results, I guessed, given some of the information she was repeating—she inserted a form onto a clipboard and handed it to me along with a pencil. She nodded to an empty chair across the room.
I took the clipboard and went over and sat down. I’d have to wait till she was off the phone to explain that I wasn’t here to have my throat examined. I was here to ask the good doctor some questions. I went through a pile of magazines. At least four of them had Khrushchev’s photo on the cover.
It was a noisy waiting room thanks to all the toddlers. They crawled, ran, fell down, bumped into things, cried, screamed, laughed, and screamed some more. Their mothers scolded, pleaded, begged, scolded and sighed. Deep, long sighs. Deep, long maternal sighs. They’d earned their sighs.
A nurse took me back to a small office that was crowded with too much office furniture of the wooden variety, too many medical tomes and too many samples of medicine. It was like one of those tiny closets Shemp, Mo, and Larry always found themselves in. Turn around and you give the guy next to you a concussion. The west wall was covered with framed photos of Evans and his family, two pig-tailed teenage girls, and an appealing out-doorsy sort of wife.
Dr. Ned Evans was as advertised by the stewardess I’d talked to earlier. A short, trim, bald man imposing not because of good looks but because in a completely modest way he exuded virility. He had to have been an athlete and a good one. A college wrestler, perhaps.